Same Questions, Same Results: Penn State’s Big-Game Struggles Continue — So What Now?

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Michael Cohen

College Football and College Basketball Writer

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Two years ago, during the summer of 2023, Penn State head coach James Franklin popped onto a Zoom call from his office inside the Lasch Football Building. He was joining the meeting to conduct an interview with a reporter about the groundswell of excitement reverberating around the Nittany Lions that summer, the first with former five-star recruit Drew Allar entrenched as the team’s starting quarterback. 

Franklin did not agree with the premise of the story — “I’m gonna go against your article,” he told me. “I’m as anti-buzz as possible.” — but he certainly recognized the near-frantic levels of anticipation that were enveloping his program. 

Naturally, such excitement was accompanied by the predictable queries about how Franklin and Co. would finally get over the hump against highly ranked opponents, how they would break through the seemingly impenetrable barrier that precluded Penn State from joining what was, back then, still a four-team College Football Playoff format.

At that point, Franklin’s record against top-10 opponents was a desultory 3-15 overall. And within the confines of the Big Ten East, where the Nittany Lions often played third-fiddle to Michigan and Ohio State, he was 3-6 against the Wolverines and just 1-8 against the Buckeyes, with his lone victory over the latter coming on a blocked field goal returned for a touchdown in 2016, the last time Penn State won a conference title. 

So the question posed to Franklin on that summer morning two years ago was equal parts confounding and simple: Moving forward, what could he and the Nittany Lions do to prevail in the most critical moments?

“It’s all these little things,” Franklin told me. “It’s one more recruiting win. It’s one more [play] call in a game on offense and defense. It’s one more summer workout. It’s something philosophically on campus that we’re wasting energy on that we shouldn’t be, you know? And then you take all those little small ‘Yeses’ and they add up. And now, all of a sudden, instead of losing by a field goal, you win by a field goal, you know?”

The memory of that conversation resurfaced late Saturday night when Penn State, undefeated and ranked third in the country, surrounded by even more hype and hysteria than at any point in Franklin’s tenure, suffered another soul-crushing loss to another stellar opponent, this time at the hands of No. 6 Oregon in double overtime, sullying what had otherwise been a magical “White Out” at Beaver Stadium. It was a defeat that sunk Franklin’s record to 4-21 against top-10 opponents, including a 1-18 mark when those teams are from the Big Ten. His absorption of blame during a sobering postgame news conference was a familiar scene — one that has played out many times since he took over.

And think about just how much has changed around Penn State between the moment Franklin uttered that quote in 2023, when he seemed to suggest that a series of miniscule tweaks would be enough to make the difference, and his most recent loss to Oregon: The Nittany Lions are on their second offensive coordinator and third defensive coordinator since then. They beefed up the athletic department’s NIL efforts to convince veterans like Allar, edge rusher Dani Dennis-Sutton and tailbacks Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen to return for their senior seasons, preserving Franklin’s lauded 2022 recruiting class. They rebuilt their undermanned wide receiver corps by bringing in four transfers in the last two cycles alone. They succeeded in getting this year’s marquee home game televised in primetime to maximize the advantages of Beaver Stadium, where more than 111,000 fans were roaring this past weekend. The list goes on and on. 

The Oregon Ducks take on the Penn State Nittany Lions during a White Out game at Beaver Stadium. (Photo by Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images) <!–>

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And its contents are far more substantive than a single play call, a single summer workout, a single recruiting victory or on-campus initiative that Franklin opined about two years ago. In many respects, the only true constants for Penn State from that 2023 campaign through the present — at least when it comes to positions of legitimate authority and on-field influence — are its head coach and quarterback. So are the Nittany Lions’ woes against top-10 opponents a Franklin problem, an Allar problem or both?

“I understand the frustration,” Franklin said at his news conference earlier this week. “But there’s a ton of football left to be played. I think we’re still ranked in the top 10. There’s a ton of football and opportunities to be played to go do some special things. I think last year, for us, is an example. We lost some games early on and then we were able to get into the playoffs and make a run. And we were a possession or a drive away from playing for the national championship last year after losses that, you know, resulted in a similar frustration and anger. So we’ve got to bounce back and we’ve got to bounce back quickly.”

Broadly speaking, of course, the buck stops with Franklin, who has won 70.7% of his games since assuming control in 2014, headlined by a three-year run from 2022-24 in which that percentage surged north of 80% and the Nittany Lions reached the College Football Playoff for the first time in program history, ultimately falling short against Notre Dame in the national semifinals. Franklin deserves credit for all of that — just as he deserves credit for a decade-plus of excellent recruiting, a string of sublime defensive coordinator hires and the impressive expansion of Penn State’s football department to compete with programs like Ohio State, Oregon and Michigan in the sport’s never-ending, off-field arms race. He has, without question, done many things right.

But as progressive and forward-thinking as Franklin has been in certain areas — working hand-in-hand with athletic director Pat Kraft to drag the Nittany Lions into modernity — persistent challenges remain. Chief among them is the ongoing struggle to identify and develop a legitimate difference maker at quarterback, with the most consistent and most dynamic play at that position in the Franklin era still belonging to Trace McSorley, a three-time, second-team All-Big Ten selection from 2016-18. The apparent plateau — or possible regression — of Drew Allar, whose completion percentage has dipped below 60% in seven of his last eight games, is confounding for a player with three years of starting experience, nearly two years of continuity with offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki and an entire career with Franklin, who played the position in college.

That Penn State has struggled to consistently recruit high-level wide receivers out of high school — they’ve signed just three wideouts ranked among the top 20 at that position since 2019 — is equally perplexing given Franklin’s background as a receivers coach, including one season in that role for the Green Bay Packers. Jahan Dotson, who caught 91 passes for 1,182 yards and 12 touchdowns in 2021, is the only Nittany Lion wide receiver across the last five drafts to be chosen in the first five rounds.

And there’s more. In August, Franklin said this year’s offensive line could be the best in school history after the Nittany Lions brought back five players who made at least six starts in 2024, another positive reflection on the program’s NIL efforts. But one month into the regular season, Penn State has experienced a decline in yards per carry and surrendered 13 quarterback pressures to Oregon alone. There have also been significant reductions in red zone touchdown rate (72.7% last season to 63.2% this season), third-down conversion rate (45.9% last season to 39.2% this season) and plays resulting in gains of 20-plus yards (4.8 per game last season to 3.5 per game this season), all of which began to reveal themselves against overmatched, non-conference opponents.

More holistically, there seems to be a disconnect between Allar’s skill set as a traditional pocket passer and the kind of system Kotelnicki wants to run based on his successful stint as the offensive coordinator at Kansas from 2021-23, with last week’s defeat to the Ducks prompting Franklin to field a pointed question about whether the team’s identity needs to change on that side of the ball. 

“I think that’s a fair question,” Franklin said. “Those are the things I think we look at every single week. What do we need to do to be successful? What are we doing well? How can we build on those things? What are we not doing well? And how can we either fix those things or pivot in a different direction? 

“And then I also think there’s just a part of when it comes to players holding themselves accountable and coaches coaching them to get it done. We’ve all got to own a piece of that. But I think your point is a fair one, you know? Just because this is how we did it last year doesn’t mean that’s how we have to do it this year. And that’s part of leadership and that’s part of decisions that need to be made.”

One key difference between last year’s team and this year’s team is the absence of backup quarterback Beau Pribula, whose dynamism as a runner made him an excellent change-of-pace option in certain personnel groupings. Pribula finished with a yards-per-carry average that was more than double that of Allar (6.4 to 3.1) in 2024, and he chipped in with at least 25 rushing yards on five separate occasions before entering the transfer portal, ultimately becoming the starter at Missouri.

When Franklin was asked on Monday to identify what he thinks this year’s offense, which ranks 67th nationally at 397 yards per game, has done well through the first four games, it was impossible to hear his answer without envisioning the things Pribula did last fall: “I think when we can get Drew involved in the running game, I think that creates a lot of frustration for defenses,” Franklin said. “A lot of the stuff that you saw on Saturday where we’re able to run some of the read packages, option packages, however you want to look at it, with the speed sweep or the quarterback power stuff, that’s difficult to defend, right?”

Inherent to this discussion, then, is a cyclical debate about the chicken or the egg. Is Allar struggling because he doesn’t quite fit Kotelnicki’s system, evidenced by his repeated shortcomings when facing ranked teams from the power conferences, against whom his record is now 2-6 over the last three seasons? Or is Kotelnicki’s system floundering because Allar has yet to consistently deliver in the highest-stakes moments — an uncomfortable possibility that seems to gain more and more legitimacy each time Penn State faces an opponent with equal talent? 

The flashes were there again on Saturday night, especially when Allar orchestrated three consecutive touchdown drives in the fourth quarter and overtime, rallying the Nittany Lions from a 17-3 deficit. But for the second time in as many high-leverage games, Penn State’s hopes were extinguished when Allar hurled an ill-advised interception into vice-like coverage, just as he did in the national semifinals last January. And when the ink from the box scores dried, this was the sixth time in Allar’s last seven games against ranked opponents when he produced fewer than 150 yards through the air. 

“It’s a long season ahead of us,” Allar said after the loss to Oregon. “We’re going to have more opportunities down the road to, you know, fix this. And I’ll be the first to go into the fire. There’s no other coaching staff or team that I’d rather go to war with, and I know we’re gonna make the most of this opportunity and learn from it and grow from it.”

Penn State’s locker room hasn’t splintered — at least not yet — but the answer to whether the Nittany Lions have a Franklin problem, an Allar problem or both is becoming more interwoven by the week. And after two-plus seasons in which the same issues keep surfacing in the same scenarios, it seems quite clear that the answer rests somewhere in the middle.

Michael Cohen covers college football and college basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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